Microsoft loses Excel patent case

The Register ^ | 6/7/05 | John Oates

[Salo]

Microsoft has been found guilty of patent infringement and ordered to pay a Guatamalan inventor Carlos Armando Amado almost $9m in damages.

The US District Court of Central California court ruled that Microsoft had infringed on his intellectual property and ordered it to pay him $8.96m.

This figure relates to software sold between March 1997 and July 2003 - Judge David Carter may review this figure to include software sold since 2003, according to Reuters. Damages are far lower than the $500m claimed for because the jury rejected nine out of ten claims made by Amado.

Microsoft expressed disappointment at the verdict but welcomed the rejection of Amado's huge damages claim. The company said its engineers started work on the data transfer technology independently before Amado approached them.

In 1990 Carlos Armando Amado filed a patent for software which helped transfer data between Excel spreadsheets and Microsoft's Access database using a single spreadsheet. He said he tried to sell this technology to Microsoft in 1992 but they turned him down. According to Amado, Microsoft started including his software in their releases between 1995 and 2002.

Microsoft is facing patent claims over Longhorn, the next version of Windows, from networking company Alacritech. Its lawyers are also due in court with Forgent Networks which claims the software giant infringed its JPEG picture compression patent. ®

[N3WBI3]

I think Microsoft was likely right: this patent sounds bogus.

I think so too, but then again I think all software patents longer than two years are bogus..

[N3WBI3]

Hey now, excel is one of the things they do better than anyonhe (if you use it for the right purpose). Access on the otherhand..

[LIConFem]

"Access on the otherhand..

Ah, Access... If Fisher Price made an RDBMS, it'd look just like Access! ;o)

[N3WBI3]

Thats a great point; will companies that become dependent on something that may have been stolen will have to rip it out if the court settlement only award monetary damages and does not transfer the right to the software vendor?

[N3WBI3]

Yea, The only two really good products in that whole office sweet are excel and Powerpoint..

[N3WBI3]

Dont come down on Fisher Price like that their little toy database would be much more useful than Microsoft's..

[LIConFem]

Probably so. But I'd still be an Oracle fan :o)

[N3WBI3]

Ya know SQL server is not even all that bad, in fact its a pretty darn good RDB, what MS should so is replace access with a version of SQL that is limited in size..

[Paul C. Jesup]

Thats a great point; will companies that become dependent on something that may have been stolen will have to rip it out if the court settlement only award monetary damages and does not transfer the right to the software vendor?

Could be a little more detailed, I am not sure which parts of the above statement are talking about the defendant, the seller and the buyer.

[Golden Eagle]

Looks like your personal attack on me (was just above) got deleted by the mods. I didn't report it either, FYI.

Ya know SQL server is not even all that bad, in fact its a pretty darn good RDB

The MS SQL "enterprise manager" was light years ahead of anything Oracle had when it came out. We dumped our Oracle systems shortly after tests showed those PC servers could handle the same load at a fraction of the cost. Might not work for everyone, but it sure has for us.

[LIConFem]

delete from product_table where company_name = "Microsoft" and product_name = "Access";

Or...

select * from product_table where company_name = "Microsoft" and known_bugs = 0;

0 row(s)

;o)

[operation clinton cleanup]

I do wish it would allow more than 65,000 rows, though.

Now thats interesting! I had no idea there was a limit.... going to use that tidbit to impress my coworkers.

[Fierce Allegiance]

Scvroll down for a few minutes. (or do ctrl + end)

[D-fendr]

I'll agree with the others that said you likely would be happier in a database.

You could build a test version in Filemaker pretty easily and you can fiddle a lot with your functionality. It may even handle your job fast enough. If not you'd have specified and tested your structure, functionality and interface.